American Nightmare

by George Cotronis

  I have to leave the car back at a parking area, before staggering across the dunes in the dark, looking for the mark on the map.

  At least it isn’t hard to find. Flames rising from great braziers are visible as I top each dune.

  I came here not knowing what to expect, hoping to find Alicia, maybe some portion of DeMille’s set, sticking out of the sand where it had been buried over thirty years ago. What I do not expect to find is the set intact, risen from the sands.

  I’d read that the larger pieces had been dynamited before they were buried, but here they are whole. The thirty-five-foot statues of the pharaohs and the sphinxes silhouetted against the dusk. The gates stretch over a hundred feet into the night’s sky. My ankle twists, as my feet sink in the sand, and I stumble around the wall, bewildered at the impossibility of what I see before me. I tell myself it’s a dream, but as the wind from the Pacific whips the torch flames and blows sand in my face, I know in my heart that this is really happening.

  Ahead, forty feet from the wall, are two lone pillars of flame. As my head turns towards the pillars, the whispers pick up on the wind. Invisible tendrils caress my cheek, and tug at my shirt, pulling me towards twin torches. As I get closer, an image becomes clearer. Keeping with the Egyptian theme, I guess it’s a sarcophagus. Alicia is lying on top of it. At first I think she’s bound there, but as I get closer I can see she’s not tied. Her eyes are shut and her breathing is ragged.

  I reach out to wake her, but she doesn’t seem to notice my touch on her shoulder. Seeing her hair draped across her cheek, I brush it back behind her ear the way that she prefers.

  Her eyes shoot open. “It is time for the third sacrifice.” Her voice is hoarse. When I hesitate she says it again. Baying like an animal, she repeats it twice more.

  I reach again for her shoulders, but she squirms away, backing towards the opposite side of the altar.

  “Alicia, we’ve got to get you out of here.”

  “Is that what you truly desire?” Out of the shadows steps the figure in the black mask. It’s hard to tell in the dark, but the pharaoh’s headdress appears on his head, disappears and reappears, flickering in time like it’s there in some frames of a film but not in others.

  “I don’t know what I can do.”

  “It is your choice to accept me or return to your life as it has been.”

  I look over at Alicia. She snarls at me and crouches like a beast that’s about to pounce. I step back and turn towards the dark messenger. “I can’t do it.”

  “That is your choice to make.” He looks up. Following his gaze I notice for the first time that there’s a lunar eclipse. “It is time. You must decide.” He extends his hands over her body, and into the light. His hands are covered in black gloves. The sleeves of his robes stop at the shadow’s limit.

  “I can’t kill her.”

  He laughs. Or it’s just the wind. The sound of waves crashing on the shore somehow carries the ten miles from the ocean. “You need not kill her. You need only release her. Your attachment to her is the last barrier to my return.”

  I want to stop and think, but my mind is racing and I can feel the pressure that I’m on the clock. “And what happens when you return?”

  “I provide you with all that you desire. All you need do is release this woman in your heart.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then we return together.”

  “The three of us?”

  The wind snickers. “Yes. The three of us.”

  Visions flash through my mind. Ancient Egypt in glory and chaos. Throngs of people in the streets of lost Irem. The people bathing in wine and showered in gold, exalting in a chaotic dance. The hint of sand blowing over the stone of the streets. Flash forward to the here and now, a big house with a pool. I know I won’t have Alicia, but before I can dwell on her, the visions tempt me. Fame. Success. The next film. Working late again. Consumed in this. The knowledge that it won’t end, that I’ll keep working washes over me and then the ill chill runs down my spine as I know that I’ve accepted the deal. I don’t know if I ever loved Alicia, or if someone like her was just part of the Hollywood dream.

  Alicia sits up, then stands. “We return now. We have a film to finish.” Her voice reverberates in the wind.

  There’s no sign now of the man in the shadows. I reach over to help her, but she doesn’t take my hand. “Does the film really matter?”

  She stares ahead. “Of course. And you have an ending at last.”

  Neither of us say anything for the walk back to the car. It’s not until the pavement of the car-park that I notice that the moon casts three shadows.

  As I unlock the car I ask, “Is Alicia still alive?”

  Her head turns. She opens her mouth but the sound comes out like it’s badly synched. “Of course. I will always keep her here with me. She is needed for the plan to unfold. Together we will awaken the world so that it might succumb to our dreams.”

  She gets in the back seat, hands folded on her lap. As we drive away, I catch sight of my dark messenger in the rearview mirror. He wears the headdress now and all the robes. He carries the stuff of dreams with him, as the Black Pharaoh comes to make his mark in Hollywood. Turning back, I see only Alicia, staring out the side window watching the road pass by as we get closer and closer to our Hollywood dream.

  THE KING

  W.P. JOHNSON

  Conrad Roth left the old woman’s house with a fading dread. He was hung over and already dragging his feet that day, but there was something especially draining about being there, a sense of being bled dry by a giant mosquito. When he first started delivering mail to Alice Tarth, she would offer him a glass of lemonade when it was hot, or a cup of hot cocoa when it was cold.

  Then one day everything changed. There were no more “good mornings”, no more offerings of lemonade or hot cocoa. Alice became mean, impatient, spending less time in her garden and more time indoors. Her skin turned white and the veins showed like the black roots of a tree. A boil above her left eye filled to the point of blindness, while her right eye became gray and unfocused, darting about like a humming bird. It was as if all the good in her had gone rotten.

  If that racist old bitch calls me a kike one more time, Roth thought, his fists tightening. Yet for all the anger he felt, there was nothing he could do to Tarth that she hadn’t let happen to herself. The garden had wilted and died, turning to a field of gray corpse hair. Her house, once quaint and cozy, became a shack of rotten wood that wheezed smoke when she cooked and swelled and shrank in the heavy rain of April.

  Then there was the tree that grew next to her house.

  Roth couldn’t quite pinpoint when the tree had grown. There was only a vague certainty that it hadn’t always been there. It was a black oak, with a bulbous trunk and veiny limbs that swayed in the wind like hungry tentacles blindly searching for a bird to eat. Its roots spread twenty feet or so from its center, slithering in and out the ground. No grass grew in its shadow and it was so ugly that locals had taken to calling it the Devil Tree in the short time that it had been there.

  Been there a year at least, Roth thought, though it’s a big son of a bitch...

  It was nearly spring and it still hadn’t sprouted leaves.

  When he reached Route One and left the dense forests of Chadds Ford, thoughts of Alice and her ugly tree left his mind. Soon it would be quitting time and he could have a beer, maybe stop by Duffers Pub for some darts. He reached the main office and unloaded the plastic containers of mail, spotting the small batch of letters Alice Tarth had sent. None of them had return addresses, a thing he had mentioned to her before.

  Just take the mail you lazy kike, she had shouted, slamming the door shut.

  The dread returned to him like a cold shadow cast by a thick cloud overhead. Part of him wished he had the nerve to burn her mail; the old woman would never know. He could always claim that they ended up in the dead letters office. Instead, he lifted the small bundle. The letters were cold
, heavy despite their size. On top was an address he recognized from his own route. Samantha Hall on Walnut Street. In fact, Samantha lived a short distance down the road from Alice Tarth.

  “Cagey old bitch,” Roth muttered.

  Another letter caught his eye. He pulled it out, reading the name and the address.

  Conrad Roth

  “What the hell is her problem?” He looked about the lot to see that he was alone before placing the letter in his pocket (it wasn’t a strict rule to grab your own mail, but it was a rule nonetheless). After he dropped off his containers, he drove straight home, passing Duffers Pub. There was little conversation on his tongue and he wanted to be alone.

  When he got home he grabbed a can of Coors Light and set out to his tiny backyard, cracking it open. There were no trees on his property and aside from a cheap BBQ grill and a small container of empty cans, the yard was plain with thin grass, bald spots of dirt, and a tall wooden fence. The sun had already crossed over into the West and sank into some thin clouds, giving his small yard a dim orange glow like the coils of a toaster. He took a sip of his beer and set the can down in the grass before retrieving the letter out of his back pocket. It had traveled for nearly twenty minutes under the cushion of his ass, yet it remained cold to the touch, like the back of a pillow on a summer night.

  “Crazy old bat,” he said to himself while opening the letter. “Could’ve just given me the letter herself.”

  Inside was a single leaf. It was dark and brown, with black veins.

  Roth laughed. “What a lunatic.” The leaf crinkled in his hands and he laughed again, feeling its thickness, its weight.

  The leaf began to quiver.

  “Hm?” Roth frowned and flexed his fingers open.

  The leaf gripped his hand. There were pricks of pain as the veins pierced the top layer of skin. Roth opened his mouth to scream but felt his throat constrict before he could exhale, gurgling air. The veins of the leaf disappeared into the palm of his hand. He felt his head fill with a throbbing pressure a thousand times worse than any hangover he had ever woken up to. The pain grew until his body and mind went numb.

  The leaf collapsed into a single black seed.

  He blinked his eyes. They were gray. The sun slid out of the clouds and spilled out over his face, shrinking his pupils to pinholes. He searched the ground for the beer can and bent down to pick it up, turning it over until the last drops trickled out. Foam fizzled in the dirt. The sound of thin metal crumpled in his hands as he twisted the can apart, forming a jagged blade. His pinhole eyes searched the ground again for a spot of barren earth and he took several steps forward, dropping the black seed where there was no grass.

  He ran the steel edge of the can over his left wrist, bleeding out over the ground. He did the same to his right wrist. Soon the veins in his legs and his feet also bled and after that he ran the sharp steel across the jugulars in his neck and leaned over, drooling dark blood from his throat. The seed drowned in crimson fluid.

  He stepped back, watching as the earth drank his blood. A screen door clacked open next-door, followed by tiny footsteps. His pinhole eyes darted towards the sound and after hearing a child’s voice, he took three quick steps towards the neighbor’s yard, staring at the fence that separated him from the child. The jagged metal remained in his clenched hand, wet with blood.

  A circle of red earth marked the ground behind him. A low rumble sounded as the top layer of soil cracked apart.

  A black oak tree began to grow.

  ~ ~ ~

  It was still dark out when the alarm ripped Henry from the depths of sleep. He had been dreaming of his son Isaac again. It was always the same; a rickety back porch on a summer night in Pennsylvania, lounging around in splintery chairs as the stars crept past them and crickets chirped their mating calls to bullfrogs. On late nights when the glimmering twilight opened up in his sleep, they would discuss the deeper mysteries of the world, digging through the dirt of unanswered questions.

  In his dreams, Isaac was different. He acted like a normal seventeen year old boy and spoke with cohesive clarity, occasionally asking self-aware questions about why his thoughts got so tangled up when they were awake.

  Why am I so stupid? the boy asked, his eyes clear of their weariness.

  You’re not stupid, Henry said. Just different.

  Henry moaned and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, remembering those final moments of the dream as they evaporated in the low warmth of waking life. It reminded him of his own childhood when he sat with his father on the back porch in Alabama rehashing the dark days of Jim Crow, a thing Henry was thankful to never have experienced. His wife was white, but it never felt like something worth acknowledging and life in Pennsylvania had always been simple and quiet. There were no horror stories of Jim Crow to explain to Isaac, no nights where he found his friends covered in tar hanging from an oak tree stained black by fire. And even if such things did happen, Isaac would never fully understand the context.

  The boy is a mongoloid, a tiny voice snapped in his mind.

  Stop it, Henry thought back, gritting his teeth. The tiny voice returned to wherever it was it had remained hidden since the day Isaac was born. Henry and Caitlin had always accepted that their son wasn’t like other boys and girls, that he would probably never have a normal life and would have to stay with them well into adulthood. But sometimes a tiny part of Henry thought otherwise, a small hateful thing that he couldn’t quite get rid of.

  I wonder if Caitlin ever thinks the same...

  He watched as she stirred awake, blinking languid eyes.

  “Hmm...make you breakfast?” she mumbled.

  Henry smirked and slid out of bed. “Get some sleep.”

  She turned over and whispered into her pillow. “Check Isaac...he’s on the couch watching TV.”

  He nodded and grabbed his work clothes off the ground, dressing in the hallway under a shard of daylight before heading downstairs.

  The couch eclipsed a blinding block of white from the TV’s glow, casting a hard depthless shadow. Henry slid his feet into the darkness and peered over the edge, finding Isaac with his mouth open, his Labrador Otis nuzzling the boy’s chin. The blanket covered half his tall body, his legs hanging over the edge while his head was awkwardly positioned over the hard arm of the couch.

  Across the table before him was a half-eaten peanut butter sandwich, the one culinary achievement Isaac was capable of. Circling that was a pile of junk mail, something that Isaac called his “stories”. The boy could barely read but he claimed that pictures and random objects spoke to him, that these things occasionally had a story to tell. Because he loved horror films, those stories were usually scary. One time they received a catalogue for Big & Tall Clothes and Isaac said it was for a monster that was moving in with them. Another time, he interpreted the gas bill’s picture of the sun as a warning that the actual sun was going to explode. The stories were disturbing at times, but they were happy to listen and let him tell them if it made him happy.

  Just different, Henry thought, seeing the broad forehead and the wrinkles of stress that were absent when they sat on the back porch of his dreams. He searched the ground for the remote control, finding it wedged under the boy’s leg. After prying it out, he aimed it at the television. After watching for several seconds, Henry saw that it was The Blob. He rolled his eyes and smiled.

  Another night of scary movies.

  He clicked the TV off and the screen sighed in the darkness. All that was left was the sound of Isaac’s breath and Henry’s thoughts as he stood there waiting for his eyes to adjust. The black shifted to gray and he stepped outside. Exhales left his lips in dissipating clouds as the last embers of night faded to dew in the earliest breath of morning. The sun was still hiding in the east, but it was already pushing the stars away and each pinhole of light was dragging the veil of darkness behind it.

  He turned the ignition in the mail truck and it groaned to life, headlights opening their yellow eyes over hi
s property. The yard was still wet and dark and in the distance he could see wooden posts and old spools of rusty wire, remnants of a winery whose crops were destroyed by hail one year. The land had come cheap and now and again Henry would catch his lawn mower over a buried piece of burnt wood. A rusty pair of grape shears hung flat against the wall next to their back door amongst other found decorations Caitlin had posted in homage to their rustic surroundings. Simple things made her happy and for that Henry was grateful as he too enjoyed the quiet countryside.

  The front screen door opened.

  “Dad!” Isaac shouted. He clumsily ran up to the mail truck, Otis galloping alongside the boy.

  Henry rolled down the window. “Little monster,” he called out. It was a nickname they had given him years ago when he started telling his stories.

  “Roar!” he groaned. The dog barked with him. “Imma werewolf!”

  “You’re up pretty early for a werewolf,” Henry joked. “Any werewolves on TV last night?”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “Ghosts,” he said, curling his lips. “Witches,” he added, fidgeting.

  “Witches huh?” Henry asked.

  The boy nodded. “Found another story,” he said with pride.

  “I saw a whole mess of them on the table. You’ll tell me tonight?”

  “Yeah,” the boy said, giggling. “It’s scary,” the boy warned.

  “Well don’t make it too scary.” He gave the boy a stern look, exaggerating the seriousness of the request. “You’ll give me nightmares.” There was a quiet second between them and Henry saw the empty expression on Isaac’s face, like the words were somehow pouring into his mind, but only a fraction of its meaning remained.

  Stupid mongoloid.

  Stop it goddamn it...

  “No nightmares,” the boy promised.

  “Good,” Henry said. “Now go back on inside then and don’t let any witches in while I’m gone. Mom’s cooking is bad enough.”

  The boy ran off, laughing despite not quite understanding the joke. Otis ran after and the screen half closed on the dog, bouncing open.